Spring 2018 Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Please note that the below courses satisfy the Culture & Society and/or Advanced Literature requirements for the major/minor in Italian Studies, the major in Italian and Linguistics, and the major in Romance Languages. Contact Elisa Fox at elisa.fox@nyu.edu for more information.

Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of selected passages of authors such as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. The language will be accessible and when necessary accompanied by explanations in English. Covers Italian literature from its origins to the 17th century.

What we call the Italian language today—the Italian of newspapers and television, of Italian language tuition, of street signs, of the Italian parliament—is only one variant among many languages spoken within the Italian peninsula throughout its history. Local dialects and regional variants of Italian continue to have a significant cultural role in literature, music and cinema. The rich linguistic map of Italy is not an exceptional case, and the same interplay between one standard literary language and several non-standard dialects is found in many other countries around the world, including, to an extent, English-speaking countries. In this course students will be encouraged to provide examples from their linguistic background, and to become aware of the socio-linguistic norms of their own community. This course is taught in English.

The topic for this Spring 2018 Italian Studies course is Detective fiction. The giallo or detective novel is one of the fundamental forms of literary fiction in the 20th (and 21st) century in Europe and the US, tracing its roots back to Edgar Allen Poe and Balzac. Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler are just a few names that come to mind from what could be called the golden age of the giallo in the mid-20th century. This course will look at the origins of the Italian giallo in the works of Giorgio Scerbanenco, based in Milan, and the “Mafia version” of the giallo with the novels of Leonardo Sciascia, set in Sicily. We will then move on to the 1970's detective novels of the Torinese duo Fruttero and Lucentini, the first ‘feminist’ giallo by Dacia Maraini, Elena Ferrante’s mysterious Amor molesto, and finally one of the many adventures of Inspector Montalbano by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camelleri. En route we will also watch Umberto Eco’s medieval giallo, Il nome della rose, and look at some of the comic books about “Macchia nera.” Some of the questions that will be at the forefront of our course will involve issues of gender (why do most gialli feature male detectives?) as well as region and dialect (why are most gialli set in the South?), while we will also pay attention to more fundamental components of what makes for a good novel, in any language: plot, suspense, character, and the role of the first-person narrator. All reading and the majority of the class discussion to be held in Italian. Students will be expected to do oral presentations, translation exercises, and compositions in both English and Italian.

The course rereads the lyric poetry of Dante as a sort of diary of the intellectual and creative history of the poet beginning from his early youth to his maturity. We will examine the texts by looking at the relationship and exchanges between Dante and the poets of his circle, together with the poetic, rhetorical, and philosophical problems that such poetry faced. We will read also texts of the Italian lyrical tradition from the poets of the Sicilian school to Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Platonic Academy of Florence. Our choice include texts of Italian poetry mostly written in the 13th ,14th, 15 th and 16th century and explores at first the role that poetry has played in medieval Italy evaluating the contribute given by the Arabic culture in establishing such a role. Looking at the reshaping of the curricula studiorum as it took place in the European Universities beginning from the 13th century, the course explores the new idea of learning and its organization focusing on the notion of poetry as it is derived from the appearance of new translations from the Arabic and from the Aristotelian encyclopedia .The interaction between the old learning and the new learning will be one of the foci of the course. The relationship between multiculturalism and intellectual history as well as that between poetry, poetics and politics are among the topics that will be discussed. Imagination, its definition and function, passions, emotions in light of Aristotle and Aristotelianism and the theory of internal senses, will be the core of the course. The medieval Neoplatonism and the Platonism of Quattrocento, Petrarchism will be part of what will be discussed during the semester.

A study of the fiction and poetry through which Italian American writers have expressed their heritage and their engagement in American life. From narratives of immigration to current work by "assimilated" writers, the course explores the depiction of Italian American identity. Challenging stereotypes, it explores changing family relationships, sexual mores, and political and social concerns.

Studies representation of Italian history through the medium of film from ancient Rome through the Risorgimento. Issues to be covered throughout include the use of filmic history as a means of forging national identity.

The success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels is astounding, not only because of the record-breaking sales, but also because of the strong emotions they thematize and arouse. In this course we will read novels, interviews, and essays by Ferrante, asking why her work inspires such passionate reading, and whether there is political efficacy in all this affect. Engaging with Sianne Ngai, Elspeth Probyn, Lauren Berlant and others, we will consider the political and aesthetic implications of ugly and opaque emotions like irritation, envy, disgust, and shame. We will also study major influences—including writers Ferrante cites frequently in interviews: Adriana Cavarero, Carla Lonzi, Luisa Muraro, and Elsa Morante; as well as those she tends to refrain from naming: Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Reading knowledge of Italian is suggested but not required. Class discussion will be conducted in English; texts will be available in English and Italian.

This course introduces students to some of the practical and theoretical problems of research and writing in the history of science through a careful study of one of the most famous episodes in that hsitory: The trial of Galileo Galilei. In the first half of the course you will read and write about some of Galileo’s works on astronomy and physics, as well as the key documents from his two trials before the Roman Inquisition. In the second half you will read and write about a selection of reactions to the second trial as a way of exploring problems of historical interpretation. You will study the responses of Galileo’s contemporaries, as well as eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century interpretations of the trial—including Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo and two recent works by historians of science.

This seminar investigates the relationship of cinema and war around the world from the early 20th century to the present. The course looks at both feature films and non-fiction: we will watch government propaganda, commercial entertainment films and independent documentaries. Topics to be addressed include representations of ally and enemy; the aestheticization of violence and war as spectacle; the role of sound; the ethics of targeting. This is a class on the history of war, and the history of cinema; no prior knowledge of either field is assumed